In today’s competitive wholesale landscape, brands can no longer focus solely on selling in. The true path to growth lies in collaborative selling—a strategy where brand reps, field reps, and retail staff join forces to drive sell-out and maximize transaction values and conversion rates. This collaboration enhances relationships with your retailers, builds in-store expertise, and empowers retail teams to better meet consumer needs at the point of sale.

This guide dives into the fundamentals of collaborative selling in wholesale. We’ll explore what it is, why it works, and the key challenges with traditional wholesale approaches. You’ll also learn about how digital tools offer powerful solutions for extending reach and improving engagement, covered in the final section.

What is Collaborative Selling?

Collaborative selling is a strategic partnership between brand reps and retail staff to optimize product movement through campaigns, in-store activities, training, and data sharing. Unlike traditional wholesale models that focus primarily on securing initial orders (sell-in), collaborative selling emphasizes ongoing, data-driven engagement with retail partners. This approach allows brands to assist retail staff in real time, equipping them with product recommendations and insights to enhance sell-through.

How Collaborative Selling Works in the Current Market

Collaborative selling thrives on relationship-building and real-time communication, but the dynamics have changed significantly with more brands managing multiple accounts across diverse locations. Here's how collaborative selling plays out today:

• Campaign Execution: Help your retailers execute campaigns on time, and on-brand.

• Education and Training: Equip retail staff with product and category knowledge to ensure they can confidently communicate value to customers.

• Sales and Inventory Insights: Collaborative selling involves ongoing assessment of stock levels and sales patterns to avoid inventory gaps.

• Tailored Recommendations: Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, brand reps customize recommendations to fit each store’s needs, based on local preferences and performance data.

Key Challenges in the Wholesale Channel Today

Trade marketers, brand reps and sales reps operating in the wholesale channel face unique challenges that can hinder collaborative selling without the right approach:

1. Managing Large Territories: Brand reps are tasked with covering many accounts and locations, making it hard to provide consistent support and maintain relationships.

2. Real-Time Communication: With retail staff operating in different time zones and regions, maintaining immediate, impactful communication can be challenging.

3. Limited In-Store Knowledge: Retail staff turnover and varied product knowledge levels can hinder effective sell-out, especially for new product lines or complex items.

4. Data Gaps: Without access to real-time data, brand reps may miss opportunities for add-on sales or fail to address campaigns not launched on-time before they impact performance.

The Role of Digital Tools in Collaborative Selling

While traditional approaches can struggle to meet these demands, digital tools have fundamentally changed the way brands can do collaborative selling by enabling brand reps to maintain close connections with retail staff and offer timely support, at scale.

With tools such as real-time sales insights, campaign action plans, training modules, and performance dashboards, digital tools address the wholesale challenges mentioned earlier. By using such platforms, brand reps can scale their reach, ensure timely campaign execution, enhance in-store knowledge, and drive both sell-out and add-on selling opportunities across more accounts than ever before.

How Atobi supports Trade Marketers, Brand and Sales Reps today

Trade marketers, brand and sales reps from the likes of Asics and Bauer use Atobi to drive sell-out in collaboration with a network of thousands of stores. Here’s how they do it:

Reach more store staff, with less work

Atobi gives brands a comprehensive toolkit to reach and engage store staff with timely communication and training. Atobi’s Reach Toolkit consists of 4 tools, so brands can reach retailers and their store staff, no matter where they operate and what systems they use:

Tool #1: A branded mobile app

With your brand’s very own mobile app, you can engage directly with retail staff and distribute news, training and campaigns to them seamlessly. The benefits of the branded mobile app are: 

• A focused brand experience. Your brand’s mobile app is your own, and you get to fully customize the experience store staff will receive when they use it.

• Your content and campaigns are always accessible to store staff. With a branded mobile app, you aren’t reliant on whether your retailers share the content internally with store staff. Store staff can easily access the latest and greatest, whenever they need to.

• A direct line of communication to store staff. With a mobile app, you have a direct line of communication, since there is no gatekeeping layer between your brand and the frontline.

Tool #2: Atobi Connect

Atobi Connect is a connection between your brand’s platform and other retailers that use Atobi. With Atobi Connect, you can share content and campaigns to your partners in a matter of seconds. The benefits of using Atobi Connect are:

• Less time spent segment and distributing content. With Atobi Connect, you are few clicks away from distributing content directly to your partners. When they receive, they can then segment who should see your content.

• Retailers that use Atobi, typically score higher on KPIs:

  • 581% higher reach

  • 71% higher skill score

  • 360% higher rate of completion

Tool #3: Atobi Embed

With Atobi Embed, you can embed your branded application and content into your retailers’ existing systems. This way you can ensure a consistent brand experience and ease of access, without complex integrations.

Store staff simply click a link, a modal with your app embedded into it appears, and they choose their store and name. Simple as that. The benefits of using Atobi Embed are:

• Deliver content in a uniform and consistent way. Regardless of the systems your retailers use, you will deliver your content in the same way, with the same look and feel.

• Extend your reach beyond traditional platforms. Instead of using a platform that only relies on a mobile app, Atobi Embed can help you reach even the hardest-to-reach store staff.

• Get real-time data in return. Despite store staff using a completely different system, you are still able to get data in return, you can measure reach, engagement, completion and more.

Tool #4: Atobi-connected SCORM

Export content and campaigns you’ve created in Atobi as SCORM files, making them compatible for use across the vast majority of learning management systems. SCORM is simply a standard for training content that makes content compatible with a variety of systems.

The benefits of using Atobi-connected SCORM is:

• Adapt your content to a multitude of systems. The vast majority of learning management systems uses SCORM as a standard for any content in their system, and with Atobi you can now cater to all of these systems.

• Your SCORM files are still connected to Atobi. Unlike with normal SCORM files, this means that you still get data in return, so you can measure how your retailers are engaging with your content and campaigns. 

Reach global scalability, without compromising on local flexibility

If you’re supporting hundreds, if not thousands of retail stores - connecting with all of them in a localized way is near impossible. With Atobi, we provide trade marketers and reps with tools such as Templates & Auto-translation.

Templates enable local brand, sales reps and trade marketing managers to quickly and easily set up Guidelines, Training, Checklists and more, and localize that content to meet specific market or retailer needs.

This saves them hours of time creating a local version of content from scratch every time they need it.

The same goes for Auto-translation. When you create your content in the Atobi Article Studio, our built-in Content Management System, brands can translate it to any language with the click of a button.

However, we all know that auto-translations create mistakes or miss local nuances. With Atobi, you can invite your colleagues from local markets to proofread content before you publish it to local markets, making sure your content is not just localized, but also accurate. 

On average, Atobi’s auto-translation feature cuts brands’ and retailers’ cost of translating content to local markets by 80%. For brands using Atobi, who are selling into many markets, the cost savings of just this one feature is up to €100,000.

Measure, manage and optimize your go-to-market strategy

You’ve likely heard the phrase “You can't manage what you can't measure” before. This phrase is particularly true when it comes to optimizing how your field force spends their time and money with your retailers.

Imagine trying to play darts, blindfolded. You only have a limited amount of darts (field reps), a target with segments (retailers), some of which give you more points (reach/engagement/sales etc.) than others.

If you are throwing darts blindfolded, you won’t know if you are hitting the right segments - or even hitting the dartboard at all.

Atobi helps brands turn data into insights, and insights into action, by giving you access to real-time intelligence of how your various retailers and their store staff are engaging with your brand and content. Atobi can help you answer these business critical questions:

• Are we reaching our partners’ store staff?

• Do they find our content engaging enough to complete it?

• Do they understand the key selling points and technology behind our brand and products?

• Are our campaigns being executed on time?

• How compliant are our partners with our brand and visual merchandising guidelines?

• Are our activation efforts actually leading to increased sales?

• Are we spending our budget and time on the right retailers?

All of this and more, from one centralized dashboard.

Ready to elevate your wholesale game with a retail activation platform? Talk to one of our experts today!